"One Drop of Blood"

Washington in the millennial years is a city of warring racial and ethnic
groups fighting for recognition, protection, and entitlements. This war
has been fought throughout the second half of the twentieth century largely
by black Americans. How much this contest has widened, how bitter it has
turned, how complex and baffling it is, and how far-reaching its consequences
are became evident in a series of congressional hearings that began last
year in the obscure House Sub-committee on Census, Statistics, and Postal
Personnel, which is chaired by Representative Thomas C. Sawyer, Democrat
of Ohio, and concluded in November, 1993.

Although the Sawyer hearings were scarcely reported in the news and were
sparsely attended even by other members of the subcommittee, with the exception
of Representative Thomas E. Petri, Republican of Wisconsin, they opened
what may become the most searching examination of racial questions in this
country since the sixties. Related federal agency hearings, and meetings
that will be held in Washington and other cities around the country to prepare
for the 2000 census, are considering not only modifications of existing
racial categories but also the larger question of whether it is proper for
the government to classify people according to arbitrary distinctions of
skin color and ancestry. This discussion arises at a time when profound
debates are occurring in minority communities about the rightfulness of
group entitlements, some government officials are questioning the usefulness
of race data, and scientists are debating whether race exists at all.

Tom Sawyer, forty-eight, a former English teacher and a former mayor
of Akron, is now in his fourth term representing the Fourteenth District
of Ohio. It would be fair to say that neither the House Committee on Post
Office and Civil Service nor the subcommittee that Sawyer chairs is the
kind of assignment that members of Congress would willingly shed blood for.
Indeed, the attitude of most elected officials in Washington toward the
census is polite loathing, because it is the census, as much as any other
force in the country, that determines their political futures. Congressional
districts rise and fall with the shifting demography of the country, yet
census matters rarely seize the front pages of home-town newspapers, except
briefly, once every ten years. Much of the subcommittee's business has to
do with addressing the safety concerns of postal workers and overseeing
federal statistical measurements. The subcommittee has an additional responsibility:
it reviews the executive branch's policy about which racial and ethnic groups
should be officially recognized by the United States government.

"We are unique in this country in the way we describe and define
race and ascribe to it characteristics that other cultures view very differently,"
Sawyer, who is a friendly man with an open, boyish face and graying black
hair, says. He points out that the country is in the midst of its most profound
demographic shift since the eighteen-nineties--a time that opened a period
of the greatest immigration we have ever seen, whose numbers have not been
matched until right now." A deluge of new Americans from every part
of the world is overwhelming our traditional racial distinctions, Sawyer
believes. "The categories themselves inevitably reflect the temporal
bias of every age," he says. "That becomes a problem when the
nation itself is undergoing deep and historic diversification."

Looming over the shoulder of Sawyer's subcommittee is the Office of Management
and Budget, the federal agency that happens to be responsible for determining
standard classifications of racial and ethnic data. Since 1977, those categories
have been set by O.M.B. Statistical Directive 15, which controls the racial
and ethnic standards on all federal forms and statistics. Directive 15 acknowledges
four general racial groups in the United States: American Indian or Alaskan
Native; Asian or Pacific Islander; Black; and White. Directive 15 also breaks
down ethnicity into Hispanic Origin and Not of Hispanic Origin. These categories,
or versions of them, are present on enrollment forms for schoolchildren;
on application forms for jobs, scholarships, loans, and mortgages; and,
of course, on United States census forms. The categories ask that every
American fit himself or herself into one racial and one ethnic box. From
this comes the information that is used to monitor and enforce civil-rights
legislation, most notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but also a smorgasbord
of set-asides and entitlements and affirmative- action programs. "The
numbers drive the dollars," Sawyer observes, repeating a well-worn
Washington adage.

The truth of that statement was abundantly evident in the hearings, in
which a variety of racial and ethnic groups were bidding to increase their
portions of the federal pot. The National Coalition for an Accurate Count
of Asian Pacific Americans lobbied to add Cambodians and Lao to the nine
different nationalities already listed on the census forms under the heading
of Asian or Pacific Islander. The National Council of La Raza proposed that
Hispanics be considered a race, not just an ethnic group. The Arab American
Institute asked that persons from the Middle East, now counted as white,
be given a separate, protected category of their own. Senator Daniel K.
Akaka, a Native Hawaiian, urged that his people be moved from the Asian
or Pacific Islander box to the American Indian or Alaskan Native box. "There
is the misperception that Native Hawaiians, who number well over two hundred
thousand, somehow 'immigrated' to the United States like other Asian or
Pacific Island groups," the Senator testified. "This leads to
the erroneous impression that Native Hawaiians, the original inhabitants
of the Hawaiian Islands, no longer exist." In the Senator's opinion,
being placed in the same category as other Native Americans would help rectify
that situation. (He did not mention that certain American Indian tribes
enjoy privileges concerning gambling concessions that Native Hawaiians currently
don't enjoy.) The National Congress of American Indians would like the Hawaiians
to stay where they are. In every case, issues of money, but also of identity,
are at stake.

In this battle over racial turf, a disturbing new contender has appeared.
"When I received my 1990 census form, I realized that there was no
race category for my children," Susan Graham, who is a white woman
married to a black man in Roswell, Georgia, testified. "I called the
Census Bureau. After checking with supervisors, the bureau finally gave
me their answer: The children should take the race of their mother. When
I objected and asked why my children should be classified as their mother's
race only, the Census Bureau representative said to me, in a very hushed
voice, 'Because, in cases like these, we always know who the mother is and
not always the father.'"

Graham went on to say, "I could not make a race choice from the
basic categories when I enrolled my son in kindergarten in Georgia. The
only choice I had, like most other parents of multiracial children, was
to leave race blank. I later found that my child's teacher was instructed
to choose for him based on her knowledge and observation of my child. Ironically,
my child has been white on the United States census, black at school, and
multiracial at home--all at the same time."

Graham and others were asking that a "Multiracial" box be added
to the racial categories specified by Directive 15--a proposal that alarmed
representatives of the other racial groups for a number of reasons, not
the least of which was that multiracialism threatened to undermine the concept
of racial classification altogether.

According to various estimates, at least seventy-five to more than ninety
per cent of the people who now check the Black box could check Multiracial,
because of their mixed genetic heritage. If a certain proportion of those
people say, ten per cent should elect to identify themselves as Multiracial,
legislative districts in many parts of the country might need to be redrawn.
The entire civil-rights regulatory program concerning housing, employment,
and education would have to be reassessed. School desegregation plans would
be thrown into the air. Of course, it is possible that only a small number
of Americans will elect to choose the Multiracial option, if it is offered,
with little social effect. Merely placing such an option on the census invites
people to consider choosing it, however. When the census listed "Cajun"
as one of several examples under the ancestry question, the number of Cajuns
jumped nearly two thousand per cent. To remind people of the possibility
is to encourage enormous change.

Those who are charged with enforcing civil-rights laws see the Multiracial
box as a wrecking ball aimed at affirmative action, and they hold those
in the mixed-race movement responsible. "There's no concern on any
of these people's part about the effect on policy it's just a subjective
feeling that their identity needs to be stroked," one government analyst
said. "What they don't understand is that it's going to cost their
own groups"--by losing the advantages that accrue to minorities by
way of affirmative-action programs, for instance. Graham contends that the
object of her movement is not to create another protected category. In any
case, she said, multiracial people know "to check the right box to
get the goodies."

Of course, races have been mixing in America since Columbus arrived.
Visitors to Colonial America found plantation slaves who were as light-skinned
as their masters. Patrick Henry actually proposed, in 1784, that the State
of Virginia encourage intermarriage between whites and Indians, through
the use of tax incentives and cash stipends. The legacy of this intermingling
is that Americans who are descendants of early settlers, of slaves, or of
Indians often have ancestors of different races in their family tree.

Thomas Jefferson supervised the original census, in 1790. The population
then was broken down into free white males, free white females, other persons
(these included free blacks and "taxable Indians," which meant
those living in or around white settlements), and slaves. How unsettled
this country has always been about its racial categories is evident in the
fact that nearly every census since has measured race differently. For most
of the nineteenth century, the census reflected an American obsession with
miscegenation. The color of slaves was to be specified as "B,"
for black, and "M," for mulatto. In the 1890 census, gradations
of mulattos were further broken down into quadroons and octoroons. After
1920, however, the Census Bureau gave up on such distinctions, estimating
that three-quarters of all blacks in the United States were racially mixed
already, and that pure blacks would soon disappear. Hence-forth anyone with
any black ancestry at all would be counted simply as black.

Actual interracial marriages, however, were historically rare. Multiracial
children were often marginalized as illegitimate half-breeds who didn't
fit comfortably into any racial community. This was particularly true of
the off spring of black-white unions. "In my family, like many families
with African-American ancestry, there is a history of multiracial offspring
associated with rape and concubinage," G. Reginald Daniel, who teaches
a course in multiracial identity at the University of California at Los
Angeles, says. "I was reared in the segregationist South. Both sides
of my family have been mixed for at least three generations. I struggled
as a child over the question of why I had to exclude my East Indian and
Irish and Native American and French ancestry, and could include only African."

Until recently, people like Daniel were identified simply as black because
of a peculiarly American institution known informally as "the one-drop
rule," which defines as black a person with as little as a single drop
of "black blood." This notion derives from a long discredited
belief that each race had its own blood type, which was correlated with
physical appearance and social behavior. The antebellum South promoted the
rule as a way of enlarging the slave population with the children of slave
holders. By the nineteen-twenties, in Jim Crow America the one- drop rule
was well established as the law of the land. It still is, according to a
United States Supreme Court decision as late as 1986, which refused to review
a lower court's ruling that a Louisiana woman whose great-great-great-great-grandmother
had been the mistress of a French planter was black--even though that proportion
of her ancestry amounted to no more than three thirty- seconds of her genetic
heritage. "We are the only country in the world that applies the one-drop
rule, and the only group that the one-drop rule applies to is people of
African descent," Daniel observes.

People of mixed black-and-white ancestry were rejected by whites and
found acceptance by blacks. Many of the most notable "black" leaders
over the last century and a half were "white" to some extent,
from Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass (both of whom had white
fathers) to W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (who
had an Irish grandmother and some American Indian ancestry as well). The
fact that Lani Guinier, Louis Farrakhan, and Virginia's former governor
Douglas Wilder are defined as black, and define themselves that way, though
they have light skin or "European" features, demonstrates how
enduring the one-drop rule has proved to be in America, not only among whites
but among blacks as well. Daniel sees this as "a double-edged sword."
While the one-drop rule encouraged racism, it also galvanized the black
community.

"But the one-drop rule is racist," Daniel says. "There's
no way you can get away from the fact that it was historically implemented
to create as many slaves as possible. No one leaped over to the white community--that
was simply the mentality of the nation, and people of African descent internalized
it. What this current discourse is about is lifting the lid of racial oppression
in our institutions and letting people identity with the totality of their
heritage. We have created a nightmare for human dignity. Multiracialism
has the potential for undermining the very basis of racism, which is its
categories."

But multiracialism introduces nightmares of its own. If people are to
be counted as something other than completely black, for instance, how will
affirmative-action programs be implemented? Suppose a court orders a city
to hire additional black police officers to make up for past discrimination.
Will mixed race officers count? Will they count wholly or partly? Far from
solving the problem of fragmented identities, multiracialism could open
the door to fractional races, such as we already have in the case of the
American Indians. In order to be eligible for certain federal benefits,
such as housing-improvement programs, a person must prove that he or she
either is a member of a federally recognized Indian tribe or has fifty per
cent "Indian blood." One can envision a situation in which nonwhiteness
itself becomes the only valued quality, to be compensated in various ways
depending on a person's pedigree.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, of Harvard's Philosophy and Afro- American Studies
Departments, says, "What the Multiracial category aims for is not people
of mixed ancestry, because a majority of Americans are actually products
of mixed ancestry. This category goes after people who have parents who
are socially recognized as belonging to different races. That's O.K.--that's
an interesting social category. But then you have to ask what happens to
their children. Do we want to have more boxes, depending upon whether they
marry back into one group or the other? What are the children of these people
supposed to say? I think about these things because--look, my mother is
English; my father is Ghanaian. My sisters are married to a Nigerian and
a Norwegian. I have nephews who range from blond- haired kids to very black
kids. They are all first cousins. Now, according to the American scheme
of things, they're all black-even the guy with blond hair who skis in Oslo.
That's what the one drop rule says. The Multiracial scheme, which is meant
to solve anomalies, simply creates more anomalies of its own, and that's
because the fundamental concept--that you should be able to assign every
American to one of three or four races reliably-is crazy."

These are sentiments that Representative Sawyer agrees with profoundly.
He says of the one-drop rule, "It is so embedded in our perception
and policy, but it doesn't allow for the blurring that is the reality of
our population. Just look a- What are the numbers?" he said in his
congressional office as he leafed through a briefing book "Thirty-eight
per cent of American Japanese females and eighteen per cent of American
Japanese males marry outside their traditional ethnic and nationality group.
Seventy per cent of American Indians marry outside. I grant you that the
enormous growth potential of multiracial marriages starts from a relatively
small base, but the truth is it starts from a fiction to begin with; that
is, what we think of as black-and-white marriages are not marriages between
people who come from anything like a clearly defined ethnic, racial, or
genetic base."

The United States Supreme Court struck down the last vestige of anti-miscegenation
laws in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia. At that time, interracial marriages
were rare; only sixty-five thousand marriages between blacks and whites
were recorded in the 1970 census. Marriages between Asians and non-Asian
Americans tended to be between soldiers and war brides. Since then, mixed
marriages occurring between many racial and ethnic groups have risen to
the point where they have eroded the distinctions between such peoples.
Among American Indians, people are more likely to marry outside their group
than within it, as Representative Sawyer noted. The number of children living
in families where one parent is white and the other is black, Asian, or
American Indian, to use one measure, has tripled-from fewer than four hundred
thousand in 1970 to one and a half million in 1990--and this doesn't count
the children of single parents or children whose parents are divorced.

Blacks are conspicuously less likely to marry outside their group, and
yet marriages between blacks and whites have tripled in the last thirty
years. Matthijs Kalmijn, a Dutch sociologist, analyzed marriage certificates
filed in this country's non- Southern states since the Loving decision and
found that in the nineteen- eighties the rate at which black men were marrying
white women had reached approximately ten per cent. (The rate for black
women marrying white men is about half that figure.) In the 1990 census,
six per cent of black householders nationwide had nonblack spouse--still
a small percentage, but a significant one.

Multiracial people, because they are now both unable and unwilling to
be ignored, and because many of them refuse to be confined to traditional
racial categories, inevitably undermine the entire concept of race as an
irreducible difference between peoples. The continual modulation of racial
differences in America is increasing the jumble created by centuries of
ethnic intermarriage. The resulting dilemma is a profound one. If we choose
to measure the mixing by counting people as Multiracial, we pull the teeth
of the civil-rights laws. Are we ready for that? Is it even possible to
make changes in the way we count Americans, given the legislative mandates
already built into law? "I don't know," Sawyer concedes. "At
this point, my purpose is not so much to alter the laws that underlie these
kinds of questions as to raise the question of whether or not the way in
which we currently define who we are reflects the reality of the nation
we are and who we are becoming. If it does not, then the policies underlying
the terms of measurement are doomed to be flawed. What you measure is what
you get."

Science has put forward many different racial models, the most enduring
being the division of humanity into three broad groupings: the Mongoloid,
the Negroid, and the Caucasoid. An influential paper by Masatoshi Nei and
Arun K. Roychoudhury, entitled "Gene Differences between Caucasian,
Negro, and Japanese Populations," which appeared in Science, in 1972,
found that the genetic variation among individuals from these racial groups
was only slightly greater than the variation within the groups.

In 1965, the anthropologist Stanley Garn proposed hundreds, even thousands,
of racial groups, which he saw as gene clusters separated by geography or
culture, some with only minor variations between them. The paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould, for one, has proposed doing away with all racial classifications
and identifying people by clines-regional divisions that are used to account
for the diversity of snails and of songbirds, among many other species.
In this Gould follows the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who waged a lifelong
campaign to rid science of the term "race" altogether and never
used it except in quotation marks. Montagu would have substituted the term
"ethnic group," which he believed carried less odious baggage.

Race, in the common understanding, draws upon differences not only of
skin color and physical attributes but also of language, nationality, and
religion. At times, we have counted as "races" different national
groups, such as Mexicans and Filipinos. Some Asian Indians were counted
as members of a "Hindu" race in the censuses tom 1920 to 1940;
then they became white for three decades. Racial categories are often used
as ethnic intensifiers, with the aim of justifying the exploitation of one
group by another. One can trace the ominous example of Jews in prewar Germany,
who were counted as "Israelites," a religious group, until the
Nazis came to power and turned them into a race. Mixtures of first- and
second-degree Jewishness were distinguished, much as quadroons and octoroons
had been in the United States. In fact, the Nazi experience ultimately caused
a widespread reexamination of the idea of race. Canada dropped the race
question from its census in 1951 and has so far resisted all attempts to
reinstitute it. People who were working in the United States Bureau of the
Census in the fifties and early sixties remember that there was speculation
that the race question would soon be phased out in America as well. The
American Civil Liberties Union tried to get the race question dropped from
the census in 1960, and the State of New Jersey stopped entering race information
on birth and death certificates in 1962 and 1963. In 1964, however, the
architecture of civil-rights laws began to be erected, and many of the new
laws-particularly the Voting Rights Act of 1965-required highly detailed
information about minority participation which could be gathered only by
the decennial census, the nation's supreme instrument for gathering demographic
statistics. The expectation that the race question would wither away surrendered
to the realization that race data were fundamental to monitoring and enforcing
desegregation. The census soon acquired a political importance that it had
never had in the past.

Unfortunately, the sloppiness and multiplicity of certain racial and
ethnic categories rendered them practically meaningless for statistical
purposes. In 1973, Caspar Weinberger, who was then Secretary of Health,
Education and Welfare, asked the Federal Inter-agency Committee on Education
(FICE) to develop some standards for classifying race and ethnicity. An
ad-hoc committee sprang into being and proposed to create an intellectual
grid that would sort all Americans into five racial and ethnic categories.
The first category was American Indian or Alaskan Native. Some members of
the committee wanted the category to be called Original Peoples of the Western
Hemisphere, in order to include Indians of South American origin, but the
distinction that this category was seeking was so-called "Federal Indians,"
who were eligible for government benefits; to include Indians of any other
origin, even though they might be genetically quite similar, would confuse
the collecting of data. To accommodate the various, highly diverse peoples
who originated in the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands,
the committee proposed a category called Asian or Pacific Islander, thus
sweeping into one massive basket Chinese, Samoans, Cambodians, Filipinos,
and others-peoples who had little or nothing in common, and many of whom
were, indeed, traditional enemies. The fact that American Indians and Alaskan
Natives originated from the same Mongoloid stock as many of these peoples
did not stop the committee from putting them in a separate racial category.
Black was defined as "a person having origins in any of the black racial
groups of Africa," and White, initially, as "a person having origins
in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East,
or the Indian subcontinent"-- everybody else, in other words. Because
the Black category contained anyone with any African heritage at all, the
range of actual skin colors covered the entire spectrum, as did the White
category, which included Arabs and Asian Indians and various other darker-skinned
peoples.

The final classification, Hispanic, was the most problematic of all.
In the 1960 census, people whose ancestry was Latin- American were counted
as white. Then people of Spanish origin became a protected group, requiring
the census to gather data in order to monitor their civil rights. But how
to define them? People who spoke Spanish? Defining the population that way
would have included millions of Americans who spoke the language but had
no actual roots in Hispanic culture, and it excluded Brazilians and children
of immigrants who were not taught Spanish in their homes. One approach was
to count persons with Spanish surnames, but that created a number of difficulties:
marriage made some non- Hispanic women into instant minorities, while stripping
other women of their Hispanic status. The 1970 census inquired about people
from "Central or South America," and more than a million people
checked the box who were not Hispanic; they were from Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi-the
central and southern United States, in other words.

The greatest dilemma was that there was no conceivable justification
for calling Hispanics a race. There were black Hispanics from the Dominican
Republic, Argentines who were almost entirely European whites, Mexicans
who would have been counted as American Indians if they had been born north
of the Rio Grande. The great preponderance of Hispanics are mestizos--a
continuum of many different genetic backgrounds. Moreover, the fluid Latin-
American concept of race differs from the rigid United States idea of biologically
determined and highly distinct human divisions. In most Latin cultures,
skin color is an individual variable--not a group marker--so that within
the same family one sibling might be considered white and another black.
By 1960, the United States census, which counts the population of Puerto
Rico, gave up asking the race question on the island, because race did not
carry the same distinction there that it did on the mainland. The ad-hoc
committee decided to dodge riddles like these by calling Hispanics an ethnic
group, not a race.

In 1977, O.M.B. Statistical Directive 15 adopted the FICE suggestions
practically verbatim, with one principal exception: Asian Indians were moved
to the Asian or Pacific Islander category. Thus, with little political discussion,
the identities of Americans were fixed in five broad groupings. Those racial
and ethnic categories that were dreamed up almost twenty years ago were
not neutral in their effect. By attempting to provide a way for Americans
to describe themselves, the categories actually began to shape those identities.
The categories became political entities, with their own constituencies,
lobbies, and vested interests. What was even more significant, they caused
people to think of themselves in new ways members of "races" that
were little more than statistical devices. In 1974, the year the ad-hoc
committee set to work, few people referred to themselves as Hispanic; rather,
people who fell into that grouping tended to identify themselves by nationality--Mexican
or Dominican, for instance. Such small categories, however, are inconvenient
for statistics and politics, and the creation of the meta-concept "Hispanic"
has resulted in the formation of a peculiarly American group. "It is
a mixture of ethnicity, culture, history, birth, and a presumption of language,"
Sawyer contends. Largely because of immigration, the Asian or Pacific Islander
group is considered the fastest-growing racial group in the United States,
but it is a "racial" category that in all likelihood exists nowhere
else in the world. The third-fastest-growing category is Other--made up
of the nearly ten million people, most of them Hispanics, who refused to
check any of the prescribed racial boxes. American Indian groups are also
growing at a rate that far exceeds the growth of the population as a whole:
from about half a million people in 1960 to nearly two million in 1990--a
two-hundred-and-fifty-nine- per-cent increase, which was demographically
impossible. It seemed to be accounted for by improvements in the census-taking
procedure and also by the fact that Native Americans had become fashionable,
and people now wished to identity with them. To make matters even more confounding,
only seventy-four per cent of those who identified themselves as American
Indian by race reported having Indian ancestry.

Whatever the word "race" may mean elsewhere in the world, or
to the world of science, it is clear that in America the categories are
arbitrary, confused, and hopelessly intermingled. In many cases, Americans
don't know who they are, racially speaking. A National Center for Health
Statistics study found that 5.8 per cent of the people who called themselves
Black were seen as White by a census interviewer. Nearly a third of the
people identifying themselves as Asian were classified as White or Black
by independent observers. That was also true of seventy per cent of people
who identified themselves as American Indians. Robert A. Hahn, an epidemiologist
at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, analyzed deaths of infants
born from 1983 through 1985. In an astounding number of cases, the infant
had a different race on its death certificate from the one on its birth
certificate, and this finding led to staggering increases in the infant-mortality
rate for minority populations-46.9 per cent greater for American Indians,
48.8 per cent greater for Japanese- Americans, 78.7 per cent greater for
Filipinos- over what had been previously recorded. Such disparities cast
doubt on the dependability of race as a criterion for any statistical survey.
"It seems to me that we have to go back and reevaluate the whole system,"
Hahn says. "We have to ask, 'What do these categories mean?' We are
not talking about race in the way that geneticists might use the term, because
we're not making any kind of biological assessment. It's closer to self-perceived
membership in a population--which is essentially what ethnicity is."
There are genetic variations in disease patterns, Hahn points out, and he
goes on to say, "But these variations don't always correspond to so-called
races. What's really important is, essentially, two things. One, people
from different ancestral backgrounds have different behaviors- diets, ideas
about what to do when you're sick-that lead them to different health statuses.
Two, people are discriminated against because of other people's perception
of who they are and how they should be treated. There's still a lot of discrimination
in the health-care system."

Racial statistics do serve an important purpose in the monitoring and
enforcement of civil-rights laws; indeed, that has become the main justification
for such data. A routine example is the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Because
of race questions on loan applications, the federal government has been
able to document the continued practice of redlining by financial institutions.
The Federal Reserve found that, for conventional mortgages, in 1992 the
denial rate for blacks and Hispanics was roughly double the rate for whites.
Hiring practices, jury selection, discriminatory housing patterns, apportionment
of political power-in all these areas, and more, the government patrols
society, armed with little more than statistical information to insure equal
an fair treatment. "We need these categories essentially to get rid
of them," Hahn says.

The unwanted corollary of slotting people by race is that such officially
sanctioned classifications may actually worsen racial strife. By creating
social- welfare programs based on race rather than on need, the government
sets citizens against one another precisely because of perceived racial
differences. "It is not 'race' but a practice of racial classification
that bedevils the society," writes Yehudi Webster, a sociologist at
California State University, Los Angeles, and the author of "The Racialization
of America." The use of racial statistics, he and others have argued,
creates a reality of racial divisions, which then require solutions, such
as busing, affirmative action, and multicultural education, all of which
are bound to fail, because they heighten the racial awareness that leads
to contention. Webster believes that adding a Multiracial box would be "another
leap into absurdity," because it reinforces the concept of race in
the first place. "In a way, it's a continuation of the one-drop principle.
Anybody can say, 'I've got one drop of something I must be multiracial.'
It may be a good thing. It may finally convince Americans of the absurdity
of racial classification."

In 1990, Itabari Njeri, who writes about interethnic relations for the
Los Angeles Times, organized a symposium for the National Association of
Black Journalists. She recounts a presentation given by Charles Stewart,
a Democratic Party activist: "If you consider yourself black for political
reasons, raise your hand." The vast majority raised their hands. When
Stewart then asked how many people present believed they were of pure African
descent, without any mixture, no one raised his hand. Stewart commented
later, "If you advocate a category that includes people who are multiracial
to the detriment of their black identification, you will replicate what
you saw- an empty room. We can not afford to have an empty room."

Njeri maintains that the social and economic gap between light-skinned
blacks and dark-skinned blacks is as great as the gap between all blacks
and all whites in America. If people of more obviously mixed backgrounds
were to migrate to a Multiracial box, she says, they would be politically
abandoning their former allies and the people who needed their help the
most. In stead of draining the established categories of their influence,
Njeri and others believe, it would be better to eliminate racial categories
altogether.

That possibility is actually being discussed in the corridors of government.
"It's quite strange--the original idea of O.M.B. Directive 15 has nothing
to do with current efforts to 'define' race," says Sally Katzen, the
director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at O.M.B.,
who has the onerous responsibility of making the final recommendation on
revising the racial categories. "When O.M.B. got into the business
of establishing categories, it was purely statistical, not programmatic--purely
for the purpose of data gathering, not for defining or protecting different
categories. It was certainly never meant to define a race." And yet
for more than twenty years Directive 15 did exactly that, with relatively
little outcry. "Recently, a question has been raised about the increasing
number of multiracial children. I personally have received pictures of beautiful
children who are part Asian and part black, or part American Indian and
part Asian, with these letters saying, 'I don't want to check just one box.
I don't want to deny part of my heritage.' It's very compelling."

This year, Katzen convened a new interagency committee to consider how
races should be categorized, and even whether racial information should
be sought at all. "To me it's offensive because I think of the Holocaust-
for someone to say what a Jew is," says Katzen. "I don't think
a government agency should be defining racial and ethnic categories-that
certainly was not what was ever intended by these standards."

Is it any accident that racial and ethnic categories should come under
attack now, when being a member of a minority group brings certain advantages?
The white colonizers of North America conquered the indigenous people, imported
African slaves, brought in Asians as laborers and then excluded them with
prejudicial immigration laws, and appropriated Mexican land and the people
who were living on it. In short, the nonwhite population of America has
historically been subjugated and treated as second-class citizens by the
white majority. It is to redress the social and economic inequalities of
our history that We have civil-rights laws and affirmative-action plans
in the first place. Advocates of various racial and ethnic groups point
out that many of the people now calling for a race-blind society are political
conservatives, who may have an interest in undermining the advancement of
nonwhites in our society. Suddenly, the conservatives have adopted the language
of integration, it seems, and the left-leaning racial-identity advocates
have adopted the language of separatism. It amounts to a polar reversal
of political rhetoric.

Jon Michael Spencer, a professor in the African and Afro- American Studies
Curriculum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently
wrote an article in The Black Scholar lamenting what he calls "the
postmodern conspiracy to explode racial identity." The article ignited
a passionate debate in the magazine over the nature and the future of race.
Spencer believes that race is a useful metaphor for cultural and historic
difference, because it permits a level of social cohesion among oppressed
classes. "To relinquish the notion of race--even though it's a cruel
hoax--at this particular time is to relinquish our fortress against the
powers and principalities that still try to undermine us," he says.
He sees the Multi- racial box as politically damaging to "those who
need to galvanize peoples around the racial idea of black."

There are some black cultural nationalists who might welcome the Multiracial
category. "In terms of the African-American population, it could be
very, very useful, because there is a need to clarify who is in and who
is not," Molefi Kete Asante, who is the chairperson of the Department
of African- American Studies at Temple University, says. "In fact,
I would think they should go further than that--identify those people who
are in interracial marriages."

Spencer, however, thinks that it might be better to eliminate racial
categories altogether than to create an additional category that empties
the others of meaning. "If you had who knows how many thousands or
tens of thousands or millions of people claiming to be multiracial, you
would lessen the number who are black," Spencer says. "There's
no end in sight. There's no limit to which one can go in claiming to be
multiracial. For instance, I happen to be very brown in complexion, but
when I go to the continent of Africa, blacks and whites there claim that
I would be 'colored' rather than black, which means that somewhere in my
distant past- probably during the era of slavery-I could have one or more
white ancestors. So does that mean that I, too, could check Multiracial?
Certainly light-skinned black people might perhaps see this as a way out
of being included among a despised racial group. The result could be the
creation of another class of people, who are betwixt and between black and
white."

Whatever comes out of this discussion, the nation is likely to engage
in the most profound debate of racial questions in decades. "We recognize
the importance of racial categories in correcting clear injustices under
the law," Representative Sawyer says. "The dilemma we face is
trying to assure the fundamental guarantees of equality of opportunity while
at the same time recognizing that the populations themselves are changing
as we seek to categorize them. It reaches the point where it becomes an
absurd counting game. Part of the difficulty is that we are dealing with
the illusion of precision. We wind up with precise counts of everybody in
the country, and they are precisely wrong. They don't reflect who we are
as a people. To be effective, the concepts of individual and group identity
need to reflect not only who we have been but who we are becoming. The more
these categories distort our perception of reality, the less useful they
are. We act as if we knew what we're talking about when we talk about race,
and we don't."